Comments on Poynter's Narrative Journalism Weblog

Poynter Institute's Narrative Journal weblog features category menus as a guide to participants' notes on the three-day Narrative Journalism conference last weekend, sponsored by Poynter and Harvard's Nieman Foundation.

I offered to send in some suggestions for possible improvements... so here they are. Perhaps these comments fit the site's "online narrative" category, one of several categories of weblog entries that were empty when I wrote this on Wednesday night.

First things first: The menus work! Kudos to all involved. I appreciate being able to get at the messages from a variety of directions, and would appreciate it even more if there were more messages. I read the comments on Halberstam, for instance, then segued from Bill Mitchell's comment to Neil Shea's entry on Barry Siegel in the Crime & Justice topic, which I might have ignored otherwise. I like that kind of serendipity and non-linearity, the "linkage by association" that hypertext makes possible -- given time and human attention. That's one "online narrative" technique worth attention: Selective link-making.

Here are some ideas for category-menu enhancements. I have no idea how difficult they are to do in TypePad or Moveable Type, which I take it is the engine underneath all of this. They're just "what if" suggestions, not "bug reports":

1. Indicate on the menu when a category is empty. Better yet, indicate how many messages are in that category. Readers are probably going to go away after clicking on more than one menu item and getting "Return to Search. There are no more items for this category. "

2. Tell people how to create a new message in those empty categories instead of providing only the option to "return to search" -- especially since picking something from a main menu isn't really a "search."

3. While you're at it, try to avoid using the word "Return" for navigation on Web pages -- for all you know, the reader got there via Google or some other route that does not involve your "Return to..." assumption.

4. Since this is a development system, with more planned for next year, you might add some system for suggesting new categories, synonyms and cross-references. For example, I don't see "tips," "backgrounding," "research," "interviewing," "public journalism," "civic life," "the audience" or (ironically, given the empty "comment" fields on the postings) "interactivity."  (Any category system is subject to quibbling: Is "Online Narrative," a "process" or "technique"? With the word "narrative" in the description, I'd call it technique. With the word "publishing," I'd call it process.)

5. Why do we need two steps -- select a menu item, then click "Go." Shouldn't we be able to go there just by selecting the item?

6. If we have to have a "Go" button and a "top" title for each menu (SUBJECTS & BEATS," "ETHICS," etc.), create a category page for each group so that clicking the "Go" next to "ETHICS" really does go somewhere.

7. One other cross-categorization that seems obvious would be chronology: I wasn't able to get to the Saturday sessions, so I'd like to scan summaries or comments on sessions I missed. Or, I did go to the Friday and Sunday sessions and feel like seeing what others had to say about them. The narrative/search.html page "Sessions" section helps, but could use some indentations to separate the days.

8. Filter out "smart quotes" and curly apostrophes from the postings. They will come through as gibberish on some browsers. (I noticed them using a Eudora browser on my Treo, for instance.)

To see another experiment in adding categories to a site with tons of archives, check out Dave Winer's  Scripting News. The "cats" are hidden under what looks like a Search button for now.

I'll see if I can get some discussion of your menus at his meeting on Thursday. I added a mention to my own blog.

One other helpful addition to the weblog would be an online version of the "Correspondents Wanted" handout that invited people to write the entries in the first place. If it's there, I missed it. By the time I stumbled on my printed copy, I was past the deadline, so I didn't send in a contribution. The instruction was to e-mail it to three people at Poynter, keep it between 150 and 300 words, and make the style more of a "note to a friend" than "a news story." I think that  concept would have worked better if there had been a straight summary of each talk. The Nieman Foundation sells audio tapes of the conference sessions, so maybe I'll still catch up on the sessions the snow kept me from attending.

© Copyright 2009 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/27/09; 3:57:23 AM.